Since I’m about to join the team at SoundCloud, I’ve been thinking a lot about the audio I create in my life. It goes way beyond music: as much as I love recording the occasional emoji jingle, the vast majority of the audio I create comes in the form of…talking.
ENTER THE RØDE SMARTLAV MICROPHONE.
It’s a lavalier mic that plugs into your iPhone!! (And some other smartphones.)
Over the past two weeks, I’ve used my new smartLav mic to record three different talks. It goes like this:
- Wear something with a lapel.
- Clip on smartLav and plug it into my phone a few minutes before my talk is scheduled to begin.
- Load up the SoundCloud app and hit “Record” before I go on stage.
- If I’m using slides, open the Keynote Remote app to swipe from one to the next. (SoundCloud will keep recording in the background). Otherwise, slip the phone into my back pocket.
- Give the talk!
- Once offstage, stop the recording. Crop the extra audio at the beginning and end using the SoundCloud app’s Trim feature.
- Name the track and upload it right then and there. After I gave my talk at Dev Bootcamp in Chicago a few weeks ago, I trimmed and uploaded the audio on my walk back to the train.
Uploading it right away is, for me, the most important part. Immediacy over flawlessness seems like a fair trade. Done is better than perfect, and making a habit of sharing my talks right after I give them increases the chances that I’ll share them at all.
The Røde smartLav mic is sold out pretty much everywhere online, but you can order one here with an estimated ship date of “end of July 2013.” I’ve loved mine, and I can’t help but hope that this is a habit more people will take up, too. I want to hear your imperfect words.
Imperfection is perfect.
A need writing app. https://www.hiroapp.com
I love the research sidebar that shows automagically stuff that could be interesting for the thing I am writing. Reminds a bit of Zemanta, hopefully it will work better.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/twitteroffice/sets/72157633647745984/with/5331000428/
Billions of geotagged tweets. I love it.
Great visualization how devices moved around at the re:publica conference: http://apps.opendatacity.de/relog/
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I wanted to use an old domain that was just a redirect in the past for new projects. So I made a simple page that also appears on all error pages (404, 500, etc.) where people find all stuff that is important to me right now with a few clicks. I wasn’t sure if I should embed one click follow for tumblr, twitter and facebook but believe it came out okay. The page loads a bit slower though. And I should maybe add the links too for people who want to see what I post first.
With all of the Yahoo-Tumblr reporting still going on right now it surprises me how many writers still mistake Tumblr for a “blogging platform.”
Anyone who has spent significant time on Tumblr knows that this whole “blog” thing is a front.
Literally.
70% of a given blog’s post traffic actually happens in the Dashboard. For some blogs, that percentage is even higher.
This makes things like ranking a Tumblr blog’s popularity through site traffic fairly dubious.
It also means that the value of Tumblr isn’t just in the original posts but the amplification of ideas through reblogs and the like.
This becomes apparent when you dive into Union Metrics for Tumblr and break down any given post’s reblog tree:
There’s probably an iceberg.gif of some sort that would work really well here.
(btw, the numbers in that image are from an “official” blog that I run, not my personal blog.)
Pictured below the surface: all of the reblogs.
(via stoweboyd)
I am in love with the new xkit 7 extension for tumblr and it’s ability to filter posts in the dashboard by type. I follow some great image heavy tumblrs but they often overshadow the great textposts. I hope tumblr adds this to their app sometime.
http://xkit.info/seven/download/
Visualization of the people I follow on Twitter. Made with twecoll and Gephi.
Austria and Germany, mostly people who tweet in German are very well connected but they are still clearly separated. In red the startup scene, strongly interconnected but with few connections with the German scene.
The nodes that are farther away from the rest have many followers but follow few people.
Next I would like to see how the graph changes if I add interaction data like mentions and maybe tweets in general. Maybe even add a third dimension to show more data. But first I have to figure out how to reliable track mentions over a week.
New tumblr post chooser. Looks like Path set a new standard. I like it. Fast and easy.
Network visualization of more than 2000 German bloggers for my project http://blognetz.com (soon launching in English)
Is Marissa Mayer About to Buy Tumblr for $1 Billion? -
I’m not sure how to feel about this. I like some things that Mayer says and does. Yahoo is still one of the big players and thousands of smaller ones are built upon some of their APIs. Even Apple uses their weather API.
The big question is what tumblr gets out of the deal. Do they need cash? Integration into other services? More ads? I don’t see any benefits yet but I may be wrong.
I am finding that Disqus style comments are increasingly out of step on Tumblr. The overwhelming majority of interaction here is native Tumblr reposting, likes, and replies.
If you are a Tumblr non-user, I suggest you get an account and try it. Here’s a post where I describe how rich the ‘inside view’ is at Tumblr.
If you’d like to chat with me about something posted here you can try @stoweboyd on Twitter, click on the ‘contact me’ or ‘ask me anything’ in the right hand margin.
I never thought about it in that way. I am a big fan of comments. On the other hand it is true that most of the conversations are happening elsewhere. Facebook is probably on top of the list and has the big problem that I can’t access most of the interactions because they are happening outside of my reach on private profiles.
When I still used WordPress I tried different approaches to get at least the public interactions, mostly twitter, back on the page. But it is really hard, because the replies to a tweet with the link are more important than the tweet with the link itself and harder to get. Maybe I can find or create a solution that shows such things similar to the interactions like notes and likes on tumblr.
Maybe I have to accept that the things that happen around my post are temporarily and it’s not possible to archive everything. Tumblr itself will change and one day all the notes and reblogs may be gone. That isn’t much different to self hosted blogs that go down one day. Because the author doesn’t care anymore, went on or even died.
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